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Remembering when talk of impeachment was serious

All the loose talk about impeachment lately makes this an appropriate time to look back to a time when the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution sets as grounds for removing a president were not political grievances, but true lawlessness.

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Remembering when talk of impeachment was serious

5:23 p.m. CDT August 11, 2014

FILE - This Jan. 21, 1969 file photo shows President Richard Nixon at his desk at the White House in Washington. Nixon suffered a stroke in 1994 and died days later at age 81. Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014, marks the 40th anniversary of his resignation. (AP Photo/File)(Photo: Uncredited, AP)

All the loose talk about impeachment lately makes this an appropriate time to look back to a time when the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the Constitution sets as grounds for removing a president were not political grievances, but true lawlessness.

Forty years ago Friday, Richard Nixon announced that he would become the only president in the nation’s history to resign. He had virtually no choice. On bipartisan votes, the House Judiciary Committee had approved three articles of impeachment against him, and the full House was set to make it official. The next step would have been a trial in the Senate where, senior Republicans warned Nixon, he was down.

What had Nixon done?

The short version is that he conspired with key aides to cover up an attempted burglary of a Democratic Party office in Washington’s Watergate complex.

But anyone who lived through the Watergate scandal remembers the two years between the June 1972 burglary and Nixon’s resignation as a cascade of shocking revelations. Nixon was shown to have lied and conspired in ways more suitable to an expletive-spewing crime boss than a president. Worst of all for Nixon, it was all caught by the White House’s secret recording system.

The tapes showed Nixon began orchestrating the coverup shortly after five men were caught burglarizing Democratic National Committee headquarters. The burglary had been financed by Nixon’s re-election committee, and those who planned the wider spying operation included re-election officials, the attorney general and the White House counsel. As part of the coverup, Nixon approved paying the burglars hush money and ordered a top aide to lie to investigators.

When a special prosecutor subpoenaed the White House tapes, Nixon refused and embarked on the “Saturday night massacre,” firing the prosecutor over the objections of the attorney general, who resigned, and his deputy, who was fired.

Even at the distance of four decades, the Watergate scandal makes every subsequent scandal that gets its own “-gate” designation seem petty.

The break-in turned out to be part of a pattern of criminality. Nixon also ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. He ordered aides to have the IRS audit his political enemies. And he ordered an operation that resulted in aides breaking into the office of the psychiatrist of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.

Nixon was precisely what he had denied being: a crook. But Watergate’s enduring lesson is less about Nixon’s crimes than about the serious, surgical way the system responded.

Investigative reporting by The Washington Post exposed wrongdoing. Congress diligently investigated Watergate in televised hearings that riveted the nation. The fact-finders included anguished members of Nixon’s own party, acting out of a combination of patriotism and self-preservation. The Supreme Court spoke unanimously in ordering Nixon to hand over the tapes. The cancer was carefully excised, and the nation — more proud of its democracy than disgraced by its president’s behavior — moved on.

Would today’s polarized public officials similarly rise to confront a rogue president? Better that we don’t find out.